mikaelaast

On Twitter, Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) recently said that nearly 100% of the code in Claude Code is written by Claude Code, and that he personally hasn’t written code in months. Another tweet, from an OpenAI employee, went: "programming always sucked [...] and I’m glad it’s over."

This "good riddance" attitude really annoys me. It frames programming as a necessary evil we can finally be rid of.

The ironic thing is that I’m aiming for something similar, just for different reasons. I also want to write less code.

Less code because code equals responsibility. Less code because "more code, more problems." Because bad code is technical debt. Because bugs are inevitable. Less code because fewer moving parts means fewer things can go wrong.

I honestly think I enjoy deleting code more than writing it. So maybe it’s not surprising that I’m skeptical of unleashing an AI agent to generate piles of code I don’t have a realistic chance of fully understanding.

For me, programming is fundamentally about building knowledge. Software development is knowledge work: discovering what we don’t know we don’t know, identifying what we do know we don’t know, figuring out what the real problem is, and solving it.

And that knowledge has to live somewhere.

When someone says "I don’t write code anymore," what I hear is: "I’ve shoved the knowledge work into a black box."

To me there’s a real difference between:

- knowledge expressed in language (which AI can produce ad nauseam), and

- knowledge that solidifies as connections in a human mind.

The latter isn’t a text file. It isn’t your "skills" or "beads." It isn’t hundreds of lines of Markdown slop. No. It’s a mental model: what the system is, why it’s that way, what’s safe to change, what leverage the abstractions provide, and where the fragile assumptions lie.

I’ve always carried a mental model of the codebase I’m working in. In my head it’s not "code" in the sense of language and syntax. It’s more like a "mind palace" I can step into, open doors, close doors, renovate, knock down a wall, add a new wing. It happens at a level where intuition and intellect blend together.

I'm not opposed to progress. Lately, with everything going on, I’ve started dividing code into two categories:

- code I don’t need to model in my head (low risk, follows established conventions, predictable, easy to verify), and

- code I can't help modelling in my head (business-critical, novel, experimental, or introduces new patterns).

I’m fine delegating the former to an AI agent. The latter is where domain knowledge and system understanding actually forms. That’s where it gets interesting. That’s the fun part. And my "mind palace" craves to stay in sync with it.

Is the emerging notion that understanding code is somehow optional something you are worried about?

I was the bemused recipient of a couple of Twitter screenshots in a Slack DM this morning. One was Boris Cherny saying pretty much 100% of Claude Code's code is written by Claude Code, and that he personally hadn’t made even small edits by hand for months. The other was a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI saying programming "always sucked" and when asked what percentage of coding is done from OpenAI models, replied: "100%, I don’t write code anymore."

I'm disheartened by this "good riddance" attitude. Do others here feel the same?

My goal is also to write as little code as possible. Not because I want to push the work onto AI, but because I want as little code to exist as possible. Code equals liability, and bugs live in code, so I always strive for the bare minimum of it.

I keep a mental model of a codebase. In my head it’s abstracted into a kind of "mind palace" where I can move around without language or syntax. Lately I’ve started separating code into two categories: code I don’t need to model in my head (low liability, because it follows established conventions), and code I can’t resist modeling in my head (innovative, new patterns, high liability). The first is easy to delegate to an AI agent. The second is too enjoyable and satisfying to stay away from. I’ll spar with an agent, but I still want to keep my mind palace in sync with the code.

Are we really going to give up our relationship with code?

Twenty years ago, instead of a smartphone, I used to carry around a notebook. I would bring it with me everywhere, and whenever I had a spare moment, I would take pleasure in sketching out cool inventions and devices, imagining fictional worlds or characters. The notebook functioned as a workout for my creative muscle.

Today, the smartphone has taken the place that my notebook once occupied in my life. Paper and pen have been replaced by an ultra-portable computer with capabilities that would have seemed pure science fiction back in 2003. In theory, the potential for creativity is infinitely greater, yet I find myself ending up as a passive consumer of content, my thumb's scrolling prowess the only muscle being flexed.

Is it possible to rediscover the joy of a blank page within the confines of the digital world? If so, what might that look like?